And the merchants of the earth weep and
mourn for [fallen Babylon], since no one buys their cargo anymore, cargo of
gold, silver, jewels, pearls, fine linen, purple cloth, silk, scarlet cloth,
all kinds of scented wood, all kinds of articles of ivory, all kinds of
articles of costly wood, bronze, iron and marble, cinnamon, spice, incense,
myrrh, frankincense, wine, oil, fine flour, wheat, cattle and sheep, horses and
chariots, and slaves, that is, human souls.
Revelation 18:11-13
I
concluded yesterday by noticing how Babylon riding the beast in Revelation 17
is like a horse and rider struggling together: the rider wants to dominate the
horse but the horse wants to retain its independence and freedom.
Governments,
not financial institutions, are supposed to run countries. While governments
try to find ways to regulate financial organisations following the financial
catastrophe of 2007/08, they find themselves, in effect, regulated by those same organisations. When a nation’s
credit rating is downgraded, like America’s and the UK’s earlier this year, it
is financial organisations exercising their power over elected governments. In
the vision, Babylon is ‘the great city that has dominion over the kings of the
earth’!
On the
day I started to draft this weekend’s Reflections, newspapers reported a plan
to privatise the law courts in England & Wales. The motivation came from
the need for the Ministry of Justice to impose cuts on itself of £2½ billion a
year before the General Election in 2015 and, by allowing a private company to
run the courts for profit, it would save about £1 billion.
Although
something similar to that had been rumoured for some time, the Ministry of
Justice was quick to issue a denial: although it was looking at ways to save
money and improve efficiency, there would be no ‘wholesale privatisation of the
courts service’. But even for the proposal to be taken seriously, it took the privatisation
of public services to a new level. Governments have not always taken
responsibility for the provision of health, social welfare or transport
services and whether the State owns providers like the fuel and water industries
has always been matters of political ideology on which people have differed.
But, historically, the administration
of justice has always been something that was the responsibility of rulers,
whether or not in practice they exercised
it for the good of their subjects.
The
news report brought to mind the time when an area in Bolivia had its water
services privatised, which I first heard about in the documentary film The Corporation, released in 2006. People
were charged for drawing water from their own wells on their own land, laws
were passed to prevent people from even collecting rainwater on their own
property and both the country’s civil authorities and military were used to
enforce the private company’s monopoly.
I am
not seeking to make a political point but an historical one. I
chose the above extract from Revelation 18 because it illustrates how the scope
for commercial trade has expanded. St John in his vision sees the sorts of
goods that every generation would trade in if it had the opportunity and I wonder
if his imagination could have coped with the idea of trading in justice and
rainwater! For financial pressures to motivate governments to consider those
sorts things illustrates the Babylon/Beast relationship in Revelation.
I will
return to this topic next weekend.
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Copyright © All Souls Clubhouse Community Centre & Church and Philip Evans
2013.
Scripture
quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®), copyright
© 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by
permission. All rights reserved.
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